[NCLUG] Good news from the hardware front

[Jim Hutchinson]

On Thu, Mar 27, 2008 at 10:53 PM, Paul Hummer <paul at eventuallyanyway.com>
wrote:

>
> >
> > Not really a cheap option but the sandisk cruzer flash drives also have
> a
> > penguin on the back of the box. However, they include some annoying
> software
> > that is a basically a poor implementation of the portable apps menu with
> few
> > uses and for me at least is more of a hassle. I reformatted mine right
> away.
> > Office max had the 4GB ones on sale a while back for about $40. I bet
> the
> Funny story about this.  My dad paid $12 on eBay for a Windows program
> that would remove that hidden partition with the drivers and apps on
> those Cruzers (it doesn't show up in Windows disk manager).  He gave me
> one of the drives out of the two pack, and all I did was `dd
> if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX` and then put a new partition on it.  I gave it
> back to him, and told him that he could add that $12 to the needless
> cost proprietary software.
>

Even funnier (in the nicest sense possible) is that the cruzer program will
even remove itself. There is a preference option to remove the software and
it takes that "hidden" partition off (actually xp mounts it so unless there
is a third one I don't know about it seems to work fine - ie an uninstall
program in windows that actually works).

-jim
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